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Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology

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<< Other Photo Pages >> California Channel Islands - Ancient Village or Settlement in United States in The West

Submitted by bat400 on Sunday, 02 March 2014  Page Views: 37811

Multi-periodSite Name: California Channel Islands
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 2.189 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: The West Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Ventura, CA
Latitude: 34.049800N  Longitude: 120.419W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
1 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
1 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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California Channel Islands
California Channel Islands submitted by bat400_photo : Map of Southern California — with the Channel Islands identified. Underlying map is an aerial map obtained from NASA (original:http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/Archive/Nov2004/California_TMO_2004304_lrg.jpeg The labeling is by: Original uploader was Mikeetc at en.wikipedia Date: 2005-10-02 (original upload date) This file is in the public domain because it was solely... (Vote or comment on this photo)
Ancient Settlements off the coast of California. Chumash village sites dot the islands. Although the Chumash met European explorers in the 1600's. their culture on the islands dates back thousands of years.

"Arlington Woman," is an individual carbon dated to 13000 years ago by a small fragment of femur. At that time lower sea levels joined four of the five present channel islands together and the climate was much cooler. Human remains and artifacts dated to this period supports a coastal colonization path to the Americas from Asia. The islands were continuously occupied from a later time - roughly 10,000 years ago and onwards.

On Santa Rosa Island, sites have been found that reveal signs of human activity dating to 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, from massive middens of abalone shells to distinctive stone points and tool-making debris.

The location given is for San Miguel island, the farthest from the mainland. Here and in other locations shell middens can be seen. Erosion frequently uncovers artifacts like grinding bowls, tools, and midden bone remains. A brief history of the pre-contact island occupation can be found here at the National Park website.

The National Park Service maintains the islands. The mainland visitor's center is in Ventura, CA. The island's themselves are only accessible by park concessionaire boats or private boat. There are camping areas on each of the larger islands and day trips can be planned as well. Once on the islands you proceed by kayak or on foot.

Note: Ancient California islanders relied on drifting ‘tarballs’ for Petroleum, see the comments on our page for lots more information
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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 76.9km NE 49° Chumash Painted Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 77.9km ENE 59° Burton Mound* Artificial Mound
 132.2km NNE 23° Painted Rock, Carrizo Plain* Rock Art
 146.4km NNW 346° Los Osos Back Bay* Ancient Village or Settlement
 153.0km NNW 345° Morro Creek* Ancient Village or Settlement
 154.3km NE 47° Wind Wolves Preserve* Rock Art
 189.7km E 89° Levitated Mass* Modern Stone Circle etc
 199.0km ENE 76° Tataviam Pictograph Site* Rock Art
 222.3km E 99° Bolsa Chica Mesa* Ancient Village or Settlement
 226.5km ENE 57° Tomo Kahni* Rock Art
 269.5km NE 35° Painted Rock at Tule River Rock Art
 311.7km E 95° Hemet Maze Stone* Rock Art
 314.3km NNW 335° Monterey Indian Stone* Rock Art
 321.5km ENE 66° Inscription Canyon* Rock Art
 330.7km NNW 338° Moss Landing Shellmound* Artificial Mound
 334.9km NE 49° Coso Petroglyphs* Rock Art
 336.0km ESE 108° San Diego Archaeological Centre* Museum
 350.3km E 98° Anza Fertility Site* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 350.6km NNW 342° Chitactac-Adams Heritage County Park* Ancient Village or Settlement
 361.8km NNW 335° Sand Hill Bluff Shellmound* Artificial Mound
 363.6km NNW 337° Scotts Valley City Hall Artifact Display* Museum
 364.2km NE 38° Swansea petroglyph site* Rock Art
 392.9km E 89° Brunette Lady* Rock Art
 393.5km E 89° Barker Dam Trail* Rock Art
 394.2km E 89° Red lady* Rock Art
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"California Channel Islands" | Login/Create an Account | 12 News and Comments
  
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11,000-Year-Old Seafaring Indian Sites Discovered on California Island by bat400 on Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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On Santa Rosa Island, nearly 20 sites have been found that reveal signs of prehistoric human activity, from massive middens of abalone shells to distinctive stone points and tool-making debris.

At least nine of the sites have what archaeologists say is “definitive evidence” of ancient Paleoindian occupation, about half of them having been dated to 11,000 to 12,000 years ago — making their inhabitants some of the earliest known settlers of North America’s West Coast.

“Finding these sites and the definitive evidence for early occupation is crucial and tells us that people were there, occupying the landscape at the end of the Pleistocene,” said Dr. Torben Rick of the Smithsonian Institution, who led the survey that uncovered the sites.

The discovery adds hefty new data to the already mounting evidence that maritime Paleoindians — also known as Paleocoastal peoples — lived along the California coast at the end of the last ice age.

Such finds have important implications for the history of human migration, suggesting that at least some of America’s earliest settlers moved south from Alaska along the coast, rather than farther inland, where retreating glaciers are thought to have allowed passage to the continent’s interior.

It was while studying some of these sites on San Miguel Island — another of the Channel Islands — that Rick and his colleagues made a key observation: They noted that Paleocoastal settlements tended to have certain traits in common that made them more suitable than sites right on the water.

The earliest sites tended to be 1 to 7 kilometers from where the shoreline used to be, for example, in elevated areas that offered commanding views of the coast and often the island’s interior. Optimal locations were also near sources of useful raw materials, like chert for making tools, as well as fresh water and rockshelters or caves for refuge.

With these factors in mind, Rick’s team turned to Santa Rosa Island to survey its previously unexplored southwestern coast.

The island was already famous as the home of Arlington Man, perhaps the oldest human remains ever found in North America, discovered in 1959 and dated to 13,000 years ago. But the southwestern portion of the island had received little scientific attention.

Upon surveying the area, the team found 19 sites that showed signs of human occupation, mostly middens, or piles of detritus left over from generations of tool making and food preparation. Some deposits covering more than 75,000 square meters (over 18 acres).

Nine of the these sites contained the distinctive Channel Island barbed stone points that are indicative of Paleocoastal culture from the late Ice Age, Rick reported, and several also contained caches of shells from red abalone — a staple food of Paleocoastal Indians.

“They probably used boats since they had to get to the island, and they hunted a variety of marine birds, seals and sea lions and collected shellfish,” Rick said. “These are all early clues to human life ways at the [late] Pleistocene.”

The large amounts of shells, found with stone tools several kilometers from the ancient shoreline, suggest that the shellfish were carried inland to be processed, Rick said. And even more important, the shells — unlike stone — can be radiocarbon dated. All four of the abalone shell middens returned dates from similar ranges, from 10,900 to 12,100 years ago.

More research at these and other sites is still needed to help clarify the breadth and depth of the first Americans’ occupation on the Pacific Coast, he noted.

“Now the important thing to do is excavate some of these sites in detail to see what more we can learn about ancient cultural practices, environmental changes, and other variables,” he said.
“As excited about these finds as we are, to us they inspire more work.”

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UC Santa Barbara Archaeology Class Unearths the Original Santa Barbara by Andy B on Wednesday, 04 July 2012
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UC Santa Barbara professor of anthropology Lynn Gamble and her students were recently presented with a rare opportunity: Excavate a Chumash Indian site that might be the location of the original Santa Barbara.

"It's a really unusual situation," said Gamble, who specializes in California archaeology. "I've never dug inside a building before."

Under Gamble's supervision, her students dug three excavation units underneath a floor in the Veteran's Administration building near downtown Santa Barbara, unearthing items, and mapping their locations. Others picked through the excavated items, sifting and classifying them. The dig was a requirement for a proposed elevator project to be constructed at that spot.

Among the finds were typical items related to the coastal Barbareño Chumash, a seafaring band of Native Americans who took advantage of the hospitable climate, abundant resources, and convenient location of the area. Fish hooks made out of shells, bone and stone tools, arrow points, and one large, charred whale vertebra were among the items unearthed.

Of special interest to Gamble and her team were the hundreds of beads found at the site. The beads were used by the Chumash Indians as currency, and the excavation team can use them to date the site.

"I'm really into the shell beads because the Chumash did not use pottery," said Gamble, author of the book, "The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers." While other sites might be dated through changes in pottery styles, Gamble will be assessing the site in part through the beads, noting changes in how they were fashioned.

In 1542, when explorer Juan Cabrillo made contact with the Chumash Indians whose relics the excavation team had unearthed, the site, known as Syuxtun (Syukhtun), was a sprawling, thriving settlement.

"He met the village chief, which was a woman, at the time," said Regina Unzueta, the designated Chumash monitor whose job it is to oversee such excavations and protect the interest of her tribe.

For Unzueta, who can trace her lineage back six generations to Syuxtun, the excavation is more than business as usual. Her mother, Ernestine Ygnacio-Desoto, is the closest living relative to the inhabitants of the village, and Unzueta grew up in the place of her ancestors, which is now encompassed by the city's West Beach and downtown area.

"Can you imagine a village site, with houses ––‘ap is what they were called –– 75 ‘aps along the coast? That's a big village site," said Unzueta. By the mid-1800's, the village had disappeared, and the site became a place for cattle ranching activity, and, later, the Potter Hotel.

The fate of the elevator project depends on analysis of the excavation, and on consultation with Unzueta and Ygnacio-Desoto. If certain items were unearthed –– for example, human remains, which might indicate the presence of a historic, sacred gravesite –– the dig and the construction would have to take another direction, or stop altogether.

Additionally, the results could lead to further exploration of the site, which is at the foot of Burton Mound, an archaeologically rich site excavated in the 1920s.

"We're getting a tremendous amount of information that has great research potential," said Gamble.

While the descendents of the inhabitants of Syuxtun have the closest ties to the excavation, the research, in Gamble's opinion, is significant to all people in the area, as well as to anyone living in the state.

"This tells us about the past, and how people always wanted to live at this harbor," she said.

Source: UCSB
http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2755
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Tar Shrank Heads of Prehistoric Californians Over Time? by bat400 on Saturday, 12 November 2011
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A long-term health decline—including a gradual shrinking—among prehistoric Indians in California may be linked to their everyday use of tar, which served as "superglue," waterproofing, and even chewing gum, scientists say.

Naturally occurring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in bitumen tar could at least partially explain a decrease in skull size over a period of about 7,500 years in the Chumash people, a recent study proposes. Decreased head size usually reflects decreased stature - a biological indicator of a population's declining health.

The Chumash lived in dense villages of up to 20,000 people in the Channel Islands (see map) and used shell beads as currency. The hunter-gatherers collected tar from the plentiful natural seeps on the islands and used the gummy substance for everything from building canoes to casting broken bones to making chewing gum.

Though the PAHs in bitumen are known toxins, "this is a health risk that no one has brought up" in the context of the Chumash, said study co-author Sabrina Sholts, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. The decline "we're talking about is a very gradual process over thousands of years, and it could have been the chemicals, these carcinogens [the Chumash were] exposed to everyday."

In the modern world, PAHs are widespread as byproducts of fossil fuel combustion, cigarette smoking, road paving, and roofing. Previous research has shown the chemicals are easily taken up by the human body through breathing, ingestion, or skin contact—and can be distributed to organs, tissues, and fetuses.

While analyzing skeletons of 269 Chumash males and females from various periods, the team found a marked decrease in skull size over time, according to the research (May, Journal Environmental Health Perspectives.)

The researchers tested modern tar from seeps in ancestral Chumash territory. The tar turned out to have high levels of toxic PAHs.

Next, the team examined previous studies about how PAHs enter the human body.

For instance, the Chumash would have literally drunk PAHs, since bitumen was used to waterproof tightly woven fiber baskets that served as water bottles.
The Chumash not only used the tar regularly, they used it more and more as the years went by, based on increasing levels of bitumen found in artifacts.

The Chumash began building canoes with multiple wooden planks about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, noted archaeologist Lynn Gamble. Tar was used to seal any spaces where the planks met and to plug holes, as well as as an adhesive in a canoe's body and paddles, said Gamble, of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Despite the bitumen evidence, study co-author Sholts said, "the most significant health impact experienced by the population was contact with Europeans." Beginning in the 1700s, the new arrivals moved many Indians into Spanish missions on the mainland. There, many Chumash died from diseases and mistreatment.

Sholts also emphasized that that there's no established way to test for hydrocarbons in ancient bones. The link between PAHs and bone change is "somewhat speculative—To actually target PAHs more specifically, we need to do a biochemical analysis of bone."

The Chumash tar-use study is more than a history lesson. Examining PAH exposure's long-term effects in a past population can help scientists understand the chemical's toxicity today, study co-leader Sholts said.

"Currently the effects of modern PAH exposure—most significantly from major accidents such as the Gulf oil spill—are not fully understood," she said. "This is a great example of how studies of ancient human remains can shed light on contemporary problems."

For much more, read the article at news.nationalgeographic.com.
Thanks for coldrum for the link.
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    Ancient California Islanders Relied on Drifting ‘Tarballs’ for Petroleum, Study Finds by bat400 on Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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    Unlike the refined oil that’s the coin of the realm today, prehistoric native groups used a different form of petroleum that’s one of the region’s more distictive natural resources: asphaltum. Also known as naphtha or bitumen, and often mistakenly described as tar, asphaltum oozes from natural seeps throughout southern California and washes up on its beaches in blobs.

    And archaeological evidence has shown that native peoples have made full use of it for thousands of years: as a kind of glue for fishing kits, as a waterproof coating for woven containers, and, more recently, as the key adhesive in making plank canoes.

    The local Chumash were among the most prevalent users of pismu, or raw petroleum, and their languages still identify two distinct types of it: the soft, sea-borne bitumen that washes up on beaches, called malak, and the harder, higher-grade asphaltum found only in terrestrial seeps, known as woqo.

    Although the land-based woqo is thought to have been more prized and widely used, it turns out that the ancient inhabitants of the Channel Islands — just a few dozen kilometers offshore — got by mainly, perhaps exclusively, using whatever malak that washed ashore.

    Archaeologist Kaitlin Brown of the University of California, Santa Barbara, led a study of the bitumen found on Channel Island artifacts dating back as much as 7,700 years, and found that the petroleum originated from an underwater seep more than 40 kilometers away.

    “There has been much debate about the use of asphaltum from submarine sources in California,” Brown said in an interview.

    “Ethnographic accounts state that terrestrial asphaltum was the only ‘high-grade’ source available for canoe construction. Many archaeologists believe that even the trade of asphaltum to the Channel Islands led to an increase in social complexity.”

    But if the trade of this high-quality petroleum was part of what tied the region’s native groups together, she explained, evidence that islanders used their own supplies may suggest that they enjoyed a sort of ancient economic independence.

    “In our article, we find that native islanders would use asphaltum from locally available sources and did not need to rely on mainland asphaltum exchange for their everyday needs,” she said.

    While providing plenty of useful insights into the technology of prehistoric Channel Islanders, these findings also have implications for the economic and political dynamics of the region over thousands of years, the team writes.

    “If the Nicoleño and proto-Chumash of San Miguel Island were able to utilize asphaltum issuing from submarine seeps for all their needs, they could maintain some degree of autonomy from mainland groups.”

    For more, see westerndigs.org and Journal of Archaeological Science, March 2014, "Sourcing archaeological asphaltum (bitumen) from the California Channel Islands to submarine seeps," Kaitlin M. Brown, Jacques Connan, Nicholas W. Poister, René L. Vellanoweth, John Zumberge, Michael H. Engel
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Archaeological sites threatened by rising seas, urban development by bat400 on Saturday, 12 February 2011
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Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion.

With no hope of saving all of these sites, archaeologists Leslie Reeder (Southern Methodist University,) Torben Rick (Smithsonian Institution,) and Jon Erlandson (University of Oregon) have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk.

Writing in the Journal of Coastal Conservation and using California's Santa Barbara Channel as a case study, the researchers illustrate how quantifiable factors such as historical rates of shoreline change, wave action, coastal slope and shoreline geomorphology can be used to develop a scientifically sound way of measuring the vulnerability of individual archaeological sites.

They then propose developing an index of the sites most at risk so informed decisions can be made about how to preserve or salvage them.

Thousands of archaeological sites — from large villages and workshops to fragmented shell middens and lithic scatters — are perched on the shorelines and sea cliffs of the Santa Barbara Channel, the researchers point out. The archaeological record is never static, and the materials left behind by one generation are altered by the people and environment of the next. However, increasing threats from modern urban development, sea level rise and global warming are poised to increase this steady pattern of alteration and destruction.

The vulnerability of sites in the Santa Barbara Channel is generally lower than sites located along more open, more gently sloped or unstable coastlines, such as the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America.

Measuring threats and identifying vulnerable sites is not an end in itself, the researchers say. "We must find ways to act by quantifying those sites most vulnerable to destruction, we take a first step toward mitigating the loss of archaeological data and the shared cultural patrimony they contain."

Thanks to colrum for the link. For more, see http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-archaeological-sites-threatened-seas-urban.html.
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California Channel Islands by Anonymous on Wednesday, 09 September 2009
It is so interesting article, I have saved the information about California Channel Islands. I had a little knowledge about this.
I want to share something about related topic:http://www.west.net/~scifmail/history.html
Thanks & Regards
Jasmine White
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Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says by bat400 on Sunday, 30 August 2009
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The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago. And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.

Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.
“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.

“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.

But not all the effects of early inhabitants were negative, the scientists say, adding that when people in the Channel Islands hunted otters, they probably ended up increasing the abundance of shellfish. The researchers also cite systems of walls and terraces that people in the Pacific Northwest built to trap sediment and create habitat for clams, which they harvested and ate.

Dr. Erlandson said anthropologists in general were not used to thinking that people exploited marine environments before 4,000 or so years ago, when sea levels that had been rising since the end of the last ice age more or less stabilized. Much of the evidence of earlier coastal settlements has vanished under the waves. And in places where such evidence remains, it is not always recognized for what it is, he said. “Anthropologists walked past those clam gardens for years without recognizing them,” he said. He said it was a coastal geologist who first exclaimed, “Wow, those aren’t natural!”

Sea levels are on the rise today, fueled by global warming, and Dr. Rick said anthropologists were rushing to excavate the most threatened coastal sites.
“This archaeological record is really important for helping us understand contemporary issues,” he said. “It’s a threatened resource.”

For more, see the article in the New York Times.
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    Re: Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says by Anonymous on Sunday, 30 August 2009
    I like those clam gardens. I've just got back from the French Atlantic coast where they've got loads of man-made tidal lagoons for growing oysters - very similar. With the large tidal range of the Pacific North-West it might be that intertidal mariculture preceded agriculture.
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California's Channel Islands hold evidence of Clovis-age comets by bat400 on Sunday, 26 July 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---

A 17-member team has found what may be the smoking gun of a much-debated proposal that a cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago ripped through North America and drove multiple species into extinction. In a paper appearing online ahead of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon archaeologist Douglas J. Kennett and multiple colleagues report the presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in 12,900-year-old sediments on the Northern Channel Islands off the southern California coast.

These tiny diamonds and diamond clusters were buried deeply below four meters of sediment. They date to the end of Clovis -- a Paleoindian culture long thought to be North America's first human inhabitants. The nano-sized diamonds were pulled from Arlington Canyon on the island of Santa Rosa that had once been joined with three other Northern Channel Islands in a landmass known as Santarosae. The diamonds were found in association with soot, which forms in extremely hot fires, and they suggest associated regional wildfires, based on nearby environmental records.

Such soot and diamonds are rare in the geological record. They were found in sediment dating to massive asteroid impacts 65 million years ago in a layer widely known as the K-T Boundary. The thin layer of iridium-and-quartz-rich sediment dates to the transition of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, which mark the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.

"The type of diamond we have found -- lonsdaleite -- is a shock-synthesized mineral defined by its hexagonal crystalline structure. It forms under very high temperatures and pressures consistent with a cosmic impact," Kennett said. "These diamonds have only been found thus far in meteorites and impact craters on Earth and appear to be the strongest indicator yet of a significant cosmic impact [during Clovis]."

The age of this event also matches the extinction of the pygmy mammoth on the Northern Channel Islands, as well as numerous other North American mammals, including the horse, which Europeans later reintroduced. In all, an estimated 35 mammal and 19 bird genera became extinct near the end of the Pleistocene with some of them occurring very close in time to the proposed cosmic impact, first reported in October 2007 in PNAS.

In the Jan. 2, 2009, issue of the journal Science, a team led by Kennett reported the discovery of billions of nanometer-sized diamonds concentrated in sediments -- weighing from about 10 to 2,700 parts per billion -- in six North American locations.

"This site, this layer with hexagonal diamonds, is also associated with other types of diamonds and with dramatic environmental changes and wildfires," said James P. Kennett, paleoceanographer and professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (UCSB News Release)

"There was a major event 12,900 years ago," he said. "It is hard to explain this assemblage of materials without a cosmic impact event and associated extensive wildfires. This hypothesis fits with the abrupt cooling of the atmosphere as shown in the record of ocean drilling of the Santa Barbara Channel. The cooling resulted when dust from the high-pressure, high-temperature, multiple impacts was lofted into the atmosphere, causing a dramatic drop in solar radiation."

These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper. An alternative theory has held that climate change was to blame for these mass extinctions. The cosmic-event theory suggests that rapid climate change at this time was possibly triggered by a series of small and widely dispersed comet strikes across much of North America.



For more, including details on how the samples were exa

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Ancient Humans Knew Sustainable Fishing by coldrum on Thursday, 18 June 2009
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Ancient Humans Knew Sustainable Fishing

Early humans living off the coast of California may have been the first "farmers" of the sea.

By managing sea otter populations they maximized their harvest of abalone and mussels, making them pioneers in the art of sustainable fishery management, according to a new study.

Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon and team of researchers collected thousands of shells from ancient settlements of the Chumash people in the Channels Islands near Santa Barbara, Calif., dating back to around 12,000 years ago.

They found that while people were harvesting millions of shellfish annually from the local kelp forest ecosystem, shell sizes remained relatively stable even as the local population grew and became more technologically advanced.

The trend suggests Channel Island settlers may have been the first to work out a sustainable form of fishing. When certain areas became depleted, they simply moved to another, effectively imposing a "no-take zone" in the old fishing grounds. And when harvests dwindled throughout the region, they switched to hunting and eating otters until shellfish numbers recovered.

In previous studies, researchers have documented human impacts on shellfish populations in the Mediterranean Sea as long as 25,000 years ago. And evidence from South Africa suggests humans were hunting the seas up to 120,000 years ago.


"For most of the 20th century, we thought any intensive use of marine resources was limited to the last 10,000 years, the same time as the agricultural revolution," Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon said. "But you have to understand that humans have been messing with Mother Nature for a long time."

Erlandson presented his findings last week at the Oceans Past conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia argues the shells are signs of opportunism, not management.

"Management implies you do something intentionally, you have a plan, a goal," he said. "I think these people had a strategy to exploit resources, and when it had a bad result, they switched from shellfish to otters."

Still, Pauly said the work could teach us a valuable lesson about managing modern day fisheries. About one-third of the global fish catch goes to feeding farmed animals like pigs, chickens, salmon and tuna. And it takes about four kilograms (8.8 pounds) of smaller fish like sardines or anchovies, to produce one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tuna or pork.

Just by eating those smaller fish, Pauly said we might greatly reduce pressure on global fisheries.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/06/01/sustainable-fishing.html
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Native artifacts off Calif. being washed away by bat400 on Sunday, 19 April 2009
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Submitted by coldrum -- Experts race to save what they can before rising seas, erosion take more.
Perched on the edge of this wind-swept Southern California island, archaeologist Jon Erlandson watches helplessly as 6,600 years of human culture — and a good chunk of his career — is swallowed by the Pacific surf. It was not long ago that this tip of land on the northwest coast cradling an ancient Chumash Indian village stretched out to sea. But years of storm surge and roiling waves have taken a toll. The tipping point came last year when a huge piece broke off, drowning remnants of discarded abalone, mussel and other shellfish that held clues to an ancient human diet.

"There's an enormous amount of history that's washing into the sea every year," Erlandson said matter-of-factly during a recent hike. "We literally can't keep up." The sea has long lashed at the Channel Islands, stripping away beaches, slicing off cliff faces and nibbling at hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cultural relics. Past coastal erosion for the most part was a natural phenomenon, but the problem is feared to grow worse with human-caused global warming and higher sea levels.

Around the globe, climate change is erasing the archaeological record, already under assault from development, grave robbers and illegal trade. Most at risk are prehistoric burials entombed in ice and ancient settlements hugging ever-shrinking coastlines. Sea level rise fueled by global warming is expected to hasten the disappearance of historic coastal villages. Vulnerable places include Alaska's early Eskimo hamlets, Egypt's monuments of Alexandria and about 12,000 seaside sites in Scotland including the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae.

The past is fast fading on the Channel Islands, a chain of eight largely undeveloped islands just off the mansion-studded Southern California coast. Though five of the islands make up the Channel Islands National Park, they are not protected from the sea's fury. In 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey found that half of the 250 miles of shoreline studied on the Channel Islands were vulnerable to sea level rise. The most at-risk were the San Miguel and Santa Rosa coasts, home to thousands of archaeological relics from house pits to trash heaps to random scatters of stone anvils and burned rocks.

Scientists long theorized the first bands of Americans arrived from Asia by following big game herds over a land-bridge between Siberia and Alaska some 13,000 years ago. Once in North America, the story goes, they trekked south through the interior.

In recent years, a new thinking has emerged suggesting the first immigrants arrived by boat and followed a coastal route into the New World.

Archaeological evidence suggests Indians from the mainland plied the Santa Barbara Channel and inhabited the Channel Islands for about 13,000 years until the early 19th century. The islands are littered with one of the longest records of maritime hunter-gatherers in the Americas.

During the last interglacial period about 125,000 years ago, sea level was estimated to be at least 20 feet higher. Waves carved stepped terraces on the Channel Islands. There were no humans back then — only saber-tooth cats, pygmy mammoth and other beasts — unlike the current interglacial period that started about 12,000 years ago and overlapped with the Chumash culture.

Nearly 700 known archaeological sites are scattered around San Miguel, an island cut by gullies, ravines and sand dunes that is the westernmost Channel Island. Untold other sites have yet to be discovered. The oldest recorded sites on San Miguel are about 11,500 years old.

The Chumash built homes out of driftwood and whale ribs atop cliffs where they had easy access to fishing and water. They hunted seals and sea otters, fished in kelp beds and collected mussels, abalone and urchins. Near the temporary camps and crowded villages were shell middens where they dumped leftovers.

To scientists, the middens hint

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